


More Love Than Salt

by orphan_account



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:59:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5107190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only echo is this: she thinks, 'We’re fixing to die, Kaidan.' Brushes the words over his cheek soundlessly, remembers the steel and sinew of the Reapers. 'Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime soon.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Love Than Salt

**Author's Note:**

> This is more of a scrap of something than a whole piece in its own right. I couldn't quite mold it into what I need, and it doesn't fit where I'd like it to, so I'm afraid it's here to brave the world on its own. Set somewhere in ME3.  
> Title and quotation from Emily Palermo's beautiful work "vi."

> **The stories all whisper that love is a sudden thing, that it hits like a knife to the gut, teeth in the lungs, a bullet between the eyes, but love has always lived inside you, in every atom, in every speck of dust in your chest. Love festers.**

* * *

 

Kaidan fucks her sweetly, one hand cradling the back of her head and the other gripping her hip, his mouth slanting over hers again and again until it feels like they are sharing more breath than touch. Instead of the terrifying void of the stars above her bed, Shepard sees the beads of sweat on his brow and the darkness of his eyelashes. He says her name, just once, and she stops biting back the desperate sound in her throat.

“You don’t have to,” she gasps out when he finally gives her enough space to do so. “I won’t break.”

Kaidan’s gaze locks with hers and he moves his hand from her hip to the back of her thigh, pulling her higher, angling himself slightly to the side. She blinks at him for a moment; his next thrust is so deep that it almost hurts, but it dances back from the line of pain immediately. His point goes unspoken but not unheard: going any faster will rub them both raw, so he is choosing to drive them slowly to the brink instead.

“I know.” He swipes his tongue over the pulse-point on her neck and rest his forehead against her jaw. She feels his rueful smile against her skin, the stretch of him as he rocks into her again, the endless tenderness of his fingers in her hair. “But I might.”

Shepard does not whimper but it is a near thing, and Kaidan huffs a laugh that goes too tight and strangled at the end. He is coming undone and she must be a fool for only seeing it now.

“Hey,” she murmurs, hands slowly reaching to cradle his face, letting the pillows and Kaidan’s arms take the weight of her. Her thumbs trace the outlines of bruises under his eyes, left there by the exhaustion that comes from irregular groundside missions and racing against time to save the fucking world. “Hey. I –” She stops, presses another kiss to his mouth, gets lost in the drag of his hand moving along her spine. Her heart beats in the space between his teeth.

If this were the night before Ilos, she would grip his shoulders and settle on his thighs, impatient and hungry and full to bursting. She would think, _We’re fixing to die_ ; she would rock against him and he would let her, irises glowing a radioactive blue. They would share something that wasn’t allowed but eagerly given nonetheless. Their sweat would soak the Alliance-issued bedsheets of the bed in the captain’s quarters, and the next morning Shepard would wake up with a soreness on the inside of her cheek from where she’d bitten it to choke back her climax. The next morning, they would find a tomb. The next morning, more people would know Shepard as Savior of the Citadel than the Hero of Elysium, and the medi-gel would erase the pleasure-ache of Kaidan’s fingers digging into her back that had been enough to remind her hours later, but not enough to leave a mark.

The only echo is this: she thinks, _We’re fixing to die, Kaidan_. Brushes the words over his cheek soundlessly, remembers the steel and sinew of the Reapers. _Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime soon_.

The rest is different. She drinks him in slowly, fills herself up bit by bit and allows him to do the same. They have no concept of prohibition, no fraternization rules that give the moment an air of illicitness. Perspective, it turns out, is everything. Shepard meets his thrust half-way and takes the time to kiss the constellation of freckles on his shoulder. Kaidan takes her hand from his temple and fit his fingers between hers, his lips warm against the place where their palms touch. This time Shepard’s ending is a sigh, long and stuttering, and her mouth is open and unafraid. Kaidan slumps against her soon afterward, though not before coaxing her over the brink again with a thumb and a whisper.

“Hey,” she tries again when they are curled towards each other like parenthesis with a novel in-between them. “Wanna know something funny?”

He flicks an expressive eyebrow – a question mark. Something in her tone clues him in that this isn’t funny in the least.

“I don’t know if I loved you in Ilos,” Shepard offers to the space above his shoulder. “I don’t know if I loved you when the Normandy blew like a firework display. I was afraid – hoped – that I didn’t.”

Somewhere in the space of two years, Kaidan’s expressions changed and shifted until Shepard has stopped recognizing them. She’s getting pretty good at it again, but she does not know this one. It is a thing jagged but cautious, like a shard of broken glass resting gingerly on a tongue. “Really,” Kaidan says.

“This isn’t because we might die.”

He closes his eyes, mouth tight and unyielding. “We are not going to die.”

Shepard loves him so deeply that her bones feel brittle, but she has never been a fool and she has never been an optimistic sort. She wants to say, _Teach me to love the world the way you do_. She wants to ask, _What will it take to save them all?_

Ashley died. What is there to keep the two of them from following?

If this were the night before Ilos, Shepard would say those things, but time has failed to make her crueler. She suspects that time has done little, really. Whoever she is now, she owes it to herself and to the second Normandy, to Cerberus and to her crew and to the Alpha Relay. To Kaidan standing on Horizon and calling her a traitor; to Kaidan standing on Mars and looking at her. Just looking.

 “We’re not going to die,” she repeats softly. Kaidan turns his face into her pillow and tightens his grip on her hand.

She falls asleep, and the next morning the galaxy is standing.


End file.
